Student Develops App That Turns iPhone Into iPod Classic

If you miss the sound of the iPod clickwheel and its retro aesthetic, pushed aside in the age of touch screens and music streaming, then there may be a solution: iOS developer Elvin Hu, a design student at Cooper Union college in New York City, has built an iPhone app that turns your phone into a full-screen iPod Classic.

Turned my iPhone into an iPod Classic with Click Wheel and Cover Flow with #SwiftUI pic.twitter.com/zVk5YJj0rh

— Elvin ???‍?? (@elvin_not_11) November 27, 2019

As well as the clickwheel, complete with haptic feedback, the iPod Classic app also has "Cover Flow," which lets you move through album and song artworks to choose your music. This works either in portrait mode, displayed on the virtual screen of the iPod Classic, or in landscape mode.

Making an iOS music app that looks like Cover Flow in #SwiftUI... pic.twitter.com/29Nfil70I3

— Elvin ???‍?? (@elvin_not_11) November 9, 2019

As reported by The Verge, Hu built the app because of a paper he was working on about the develpment of Apple's iconic music player.

The project has already attracted attention from Tony Fadell, former SVP of Apple's iPod division (colloquailly dubbed the "father of the iPod") and the co-inventor of the first iPhone, but whether Hu can actually release the app remains to be seen.

NICE THROWBACK... https://t.co/TqXWTsi39h

— Tony Fadell (@tfadell) November 28, 2019

"I've been working on this project since October and whether I can release it or not does depend on whether Apple approve it," Hu tells The Verge. "I believe they have legitimate reasons not to (patents and other reasons)."

Should the application not make it onto Apple's App Store, Hu says that he might still "release it as an open source project after seeing the response from the community," and hopes to finish development by the end of the year.

UPDATE 12/17: A separate project known as Rewound, which also makes your iPhone look like an iPod classic, has been removed from the App Store by Apple. The removal notice says Rewound copied iPod design, charged for Apple Music features, and created something that could be mistaken for an Apple product.

"We can't update the app to get it re-approved without breaking the app for all 170,000+ users. So we're going to have to upload a separate version but feel it is barely worth the time or effort to even try and humor them, they're just going to keep saying no until users can't possible make it like their favourite music player," Rewound developers said in a Medium post.

On Twitter, Elvin Hu stressed that he is not associated with Rewound. "The app I worked on isn't Rewound. Rewound is developed by someone else," he wrote.

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"I made this demo over a flight because I like SwiftUI, not because I want to make money or anything," Hu said later. "I will release tutorials on how some key features here are implemented in a few months. Stay tuned."

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